Today was a fascinating day. First thing, we got up and walked over to the LDS Conference Center, a 21,000 seat auditorium used for church events. They offer a 30-minute guided tour. I expected it to be mildly interesting, but it was actually really cool. The main floor of the conference center is actually 96′ below ground level, with an array of nine skylights that bring outside light underground. The king truss weighs 621 tons– you can see from these pictures that there are no internal pillars or supports in the conference area; the mezzanine and balcony levels are cantilevered. The workmanship of the lectern, flooring, and everything else is breathtaking. (In fact, the rostrum is large enough to hold the entire Tabernacle… with a 2′ boundary left over!) There’s a lot of gorgeous artwork, including the originals of Arnold Friburg‘s 12 Book of Mormon paintings and a stunning sculpture by some guy whose name I have unfortunately forgotten. The roof garden is pretty stunning, too; it looks much like a natural mountain meadow, and the outside of the building is terraced to reinforce that impression. I got some good across-the-street shots of the temple, too.
After we left the conference center, we walked over to the Church Administration Building; our tour guide mentioned that the admin building had an observation deck on the 26th floor. They sure did, as you can see from the below shots of the Utah Statehouse (north of the building) and the temple (east of it).
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| The Utah state capital and the SLC temple, from 26 stories up |
Our next stop was actually the surprise hit: the Church Art and History Museum. I’m not much on art museums, so I figured that this one would be a quick in-and-out. However, I hadn’t counted on the variety of pioneer artifacts they had– all kinds of great stuff, including tools and dies used to make the original Utah Territory currency, tools from the Salt Lake City temple construction, and lots of details of the original economic and territorial missions that the church sent out to help populate the intermountain West. That was cool enough, but what really blew me away was the collection of submissions to the 6th international LDS art competition (note that the link should take you to a Flash presentation of the artwork itself). Some of the sculptures and paintings were ugly not to my liking, but others, like the quilt “Let Us Oft Speak Kind Words”, the photo “Two Prophets Saluting Each Other” (where the photographer caught a picture of President Hinckley’s plane dipping a wing in salute while flying over a wagon train recreation commemorating the 150th anniversary of the pioneer migration), and Don Christensen’s painting “Called To Serve” were just outstanding. A couple of the works were so beautiful that they moved me to tears, and that’s not exactly my usual M.O. Who would have guessed that an art museum would be one of my favorite parts of this trip?
On our way to lunch, we finally got good pictures taken at the pedestal.
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| Paul & Arlene @ the temple |
After lunch, we drove to find a scrapbooking store, but not until after we’d visited the This Is the Place Monument. I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect, but I learned quite a bit from the monument and its surrounding information. For example, Provo was named for Etienne Provot, a French fur trapper and explorer who was the first white man to explore the Salt Lake valley. A trio of Catholic friars were the first to map out the route from Santa Fe northward into the Utah territory. And so on, all of it mostly useless but nonetheless interesting.
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| This is the place, all right |
We had dinner (mostly dessert) at Passages again and watched the new episode of MI5 (Verdict: it’s no 24, but it’ll do). Arlene’s watching Aliens while I write this, then it’s time to pack. Tomorrow, back to the real world. Oh yeah– it was 105 degrees today. Mmm, mmm, good.
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